November arrives and the shop windows of the bakeries are filled with the famous balls wrapped with pine nuts. One of the bakeries where they make the best panellets is located in Reus and is called Confectionery Padreny

Confectionery Padreny, located in the Pallol district of Reus, has more than two hundred years of history and six generations of pastry chefs linked to the house. A couple of years ago Marisa Capdevila passed the baton to her daughter Glòria Vicheto, the current head. In 2015, the store was honored with the National Prize for Centenary Establishments.

One of the products for which this confectionery is most known throughout Catalonia are precisely the panellets, and this is where Chone de la Sotilla, an interior designer and founding partner of Deulonder, buys them every November. They are made of yolk, pine nuts, pine nuts coated with chocolate, and marzipan of several classic varieties such as cinnamon, vanilla, red fruit, coconut, lemon and hazelnut.

What is the secret of your panellets? Marisa Capdevila assures that there is no secret, but that the ingredients are of the highest quality, especially the almonds and the pine nuts. «The elaboration is always the same, we buy the almond with skin, we peel it and choose it and then we blanch it in a double-bottomed kettle, to which we add the sugar, the lemon zest, a lemon directly from the tree that brought by our supplier, and let it boil in a bain-marie. In the case of the yolk panellets, the egg is also boiled in the boiler and we leave the dough at rest two or three days before proceeding to make the panellets. Regarding the pine nuts, we do not look at the price, it has to be a national pinion, precious. »

Other specialties of the house are the candied fruit (melon, mandarin, apricot, cherry, etc.) and the «rosé glacées», however, what has more output is the classic panellet of pine nuts, with a refined and smooth flavor. Confectionery Padreny sends its sweet treasures all over the world, to Canada and to Australia, for example.

La Confitería is located in a city, Reus, in the province of Tarragona, which offers different centers of cultural interest: the route through the modernist houses with works by Lluís Domènech and Montaner and Gaudí (Pere Mata Institute, Casa Navàs, Casa Rull and Casa Gasull), without forgetting the birthplace where Antoni Gaudí was born and the institute where he studied. For more tourist information: http://www.reusturisme.cat